How Russians hacked the Democrats’ emails

The Associated Press reports: It was just before noon in Moscow on March 10, 2016, when the first volley of malicious messages hit the Hillary Clinton campaign.

The first 29 phishing emails were almost all misfires. Addressed to people who worked for Clinton during her first presidential run, the messages bounced back untouched.

Except one.

Within nine days, some of the campaign’s most consequential secrets would be in the hackers’ hands, part of a massive operation aimed at vacuuming up millions of messages from thousands of inboxes across the world.

An Associated Press investigation into the digital break-ins that disrupted the U.S. presidential contest has sketched out an anatomy of the hack that led to months of damaging disclosures about the Democratic Party’s nominee. It wasn’t just a few aides that the hackers went after; it was an all-out blitz across the Democratic Party. They tried to compromise Clinton’s inner circle and more than 130 party employees, supporters and contractors. [Continue reading…]

Comments

While this article is informative, it can’t resist the dramatic touch of referring to “the Clinton campaign’s top-of-the-line digital security.”

No way. Top-of-the-line = unbreachable and fully aware of attacks. Without actual top-of-the-line security, the world financial system wouldn’t last a day. The campaign proudly erected some kind of Maginot Line, based on a premise even less plausible than the assumption that the Germans couldn’t make their way through the Ardennes forest: the idea that techno-bumbler John Podesta could safely harbor a trove of emails in his — get this — gmail account.

Here’s a second point, absent from the article and from most discussion. Does anyone seriously believe that the Russians didn’t hack the Republicans? That they aren’t sitting on a similar, utterly damning hoard? Let’s not mistake the opening moves for the endgame.

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